Although the future of the 2.1-meter telescope atop Kitt Peak in
Arizona seemed quite dismal at the time, on May 22, 2014, I joined two
"retired"-professionals-turned-amateurs, Mark Trueblood and
Larry Lebofsky, for a night of observations there. Their goal was to
capture new images of some potentially hazardous asteroids--having
orbits that might slam them into Earth--so that dynamicists could better
calculate those orbits.

At first their effort was stymied by clouds--what Lebofsky called
"big, puffy, white things." So we hung out, waiting, and
chatted about the state of observational astronomy and the impending
loss of the 2.1-meter. A workhorse for decades, it was scheduled for
shutdown in two months because of funding shortages. The instrument was
one of only a handful of professional telescopes in the United States
available to the general astronomy community and to highly skilled
amateurs like Trueblood and Lebofsky. It was for this reason that both
were willing to wait as long as necessary for the clouds to clear. As
Trueblood noted that night, "I really want to get some data this
last time."

The threatened shuttering of the 2.1-meter, however, was part of a
much larger financial crisis for four scopes on Kitt Peak (S&T: Dec.
2012, p. 34). With the National Science Foundation (NSF) faced with a
flat budget, as well as increased costs to construct and operate several
new state-of-the-art telescopes, something had to give. And as explained
by David Silva, director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory
(NOAO), when the NSF asked the astronomical community to list its
scientific priorities using existing facilities, "unfortunately
Kitt Peak came up on the short end."

Nor was the NSF alone in putting its NOAO and National Solar
Observatory (NSO) Kitt Peak scopes at the bottom of the list. During
this same time period Yale University also decided to withdraw from the
mountain.

As a result, in 2014 Kitt Peak was threatened with some major
changes and cutbacks, with several of its two dozen telescopes on the
financial chopping block.

"The astronomical community is facing a situation where the
majority of astronomers who don't reside or work at institutions
that own their own telescopes are just going to be out of luck,"
says John Salzer (Indiana University), president of the 3.5-meter WIYN
telescope's board of directors. "They are not going to have
access to ground-based telescopes."

Building a City of Telescopes

Kitt Peak's astronomical history began in the 1950s. At that
time a panel of astronomers recommended that the NSF establish a
national observatory for astronomical and solar research as well as for
education. Such a facility would provide American astronomers access to
professional-grade telescopes, even if their respective universities had
no money to build or maintain such instruments themselves.

Based on this recommendation and after several years of site
research, Kitt Peak was picked as the best location for the national
observatory. The NSF signed a lease in 1958 with the Tohono O'odham
nation for the use of about 270 acres on top of the mountain and then
created cooperative agreements with what would later become NOAO and NSO
for operating various telescope facilities on the summit.

During the next half century, Kitt Peak attracted telescopes of all
shapes and sizes, capable of observing in optical, infrared, and radio
wavelengths. Some, like the 4-meter Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope and the
McMathPierce Solar Telescope, were national observatories planned and
constructed for the mountain itself. When completed, the Mayall was the
second-largest telescope in the world, while the McMath-Pierce still
remains tied for world's largest solar telescope.

Other telescopes originally housed at different locations moved to
Kitt Peak to take advantage of its dark skies and clear air. Case
Western Reserve University's 0.6-meter telescope, for example, was
built in 1939 in Cleveland but was relocated to Kitt Peak in 1979.

The ownership and operation of these telescopes also varied.
Although NSF leases Kitt Peak from the Tohono O'odham nation, it
does not actually own or operate most of the two dozen telescopes there.
Instead, NOAO, under its agreement with NSF, acts as the
landlord--maintaining the roads and providing the utilities--while
numerous other universities, partnerships, and organizations (such as
NSO) do the owning and operating (see table above).

For example, the WIYN 3.5-meter was built in the 1990s and operated
by a partnership of three universities --the University of Wisconsin,
Indiana University, and Yale--plus NOAO, with the four holding a 26%,
17%, 17%, and 40% share of the partnership, respectively.

Similarly, NSO controlled and operated the two solar scopes on the
mountain, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope and (until 2014) the
Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) facility,
with NOAO again acting as landlord. NSF funds both NOAO and NSO, making
the relationship even more convoluted.

Thus, despite being proprietor over this telescopic metropolis,
NOAO fully owns only two telescopes there, the 4-meter Mayall and the
2.1-meter. For decades, both of these, as well as NOAO's 40% of
WIYN time, were made available for serious research to anyone in the
general astronomy community, including observers like Trueblood and
Lebofsky.

Budget Squeeze

In 2014, however, this decades-long arrangement faced some major
changes, including the threatened (temporary) slowdown of the Mayall and
the shutdown of three telescopes: the 2.1-meter, the McMath-Pierce Solar
Telescope, and WIYN.

The changes first began with NSO, which in 2003 decided that it
needed to withdraw from Kitt Peak. This decision was part of NSO's
long-term plan, which recognized that for it to operate the new 4-meter
Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii (slated for first
light in 2019), the agency needed to find additional operating funds.
Those funds were to come from the money used to operate facilities at
Kitt Peak.

NSO therefore decided to remove SOLIS to an as-yet-undetermined new
location, while handing off the operation of the McMath-Pierce Solar
Telescope to someone else or closing it down entirely. Originally the
plan called for a slow ramp-down of operations and funding, to be
completed in 2019, so that there would be time to find another entity to
take over McMath-Pierce.

In 2012, however, a NSF review by a committee of astronomers
mandated that this ramp-down be accelerated and that NSO be off the
mountain no later than the end of 2015. As a result "there will be
a little bit of a gap," explains NSO Deputy Director Mark Giampapa.
"We are working hard to find potential partners who could operate
the telescope facilities during and after this rampdown period."

As part of this effort NSO has solicited the solar science
community. They have so far assembled a tentative consortium of about
eight scientists from both NASA and various universities who "are
in the process of seeking funds" for the telescope's continued
operation, he says. So far, however, this effort will only keep the
telescope operating through 2015.

Beyond that date the future remains unknown. NSO is even looking
into what it would cost to decommission McMath-Pierce. This
decommissioning could range from "mothballing to total site
deconstruction and reclamation," Giampapa says.

Crises and Comebacks

That same 2012 NSF review also accelerated NOAO's exit from
Kitt Peak and the divestment of its telescopes there. The NSF reduced
funds for the Kitt Peak optical telescopes to pay for operations
elsewhere, chiefly the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in
Chile and NSO's DKIST, explains Robert Blum, NOAO's deputy
director. Eventually these savings will also help pay for the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope when it begins operations in the next decade.

The review also decided, however, that NOAO would remain as Kitt
Peak's landlord, maintaining the utilities and roads as it has for
decades.

The 4-meter Mayall fortunately had a new collaboration under way.
Based on the 2014 recommendations of a panel of physicists, the
Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will
use it to undertake a 5-year survey to study dark energy. The project
will use the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, to be installed
sometime in the 2018-2019 time frame. NOAO will continue to operate the
telescope, but the Department of Energy will fund it.

As with NSO, NOAO's plan had been to ramp down its budget
slowly until then, to maximize use of the telescope during this
transition. The NSF review mandated, however, that NOAO also divest
itself from Kitt Peak by the end of 2015. As a result, the use and
availability of the 4-meter during the transition period will be greatly
curtailed. "We will have to do some things like take some
instruments out of rotation, provide fewer instruments on the telescope,
and most likely go to longer, survey-type programs," explains Lori
Allen, director of Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Throughout 2014 and into the beginning of 2015 the 2.1-meter
telescope remained completely orphaned, however. Kitt Peak issued a call
for proposals from the community, for anyone who wanted to operate the
2.1-meter. By mid-2014 it had received four proposals with serious
inquiries from a total of six parties, but none could be finalized
before 2015.

Thus, on July 31, 2014, the 2.1-meter was officially shut down.

In March 2015, however, a university partnership won the right to
take over the telescope. The agreement was not yet public when this
article went to press, but if all goes well, Allen hopes the telescope
will reopen for research sometime this year.

Then there are the budget problems at the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope.
In 2013 Yale decided that its research and academic priorities no longer
included WIYN, and it formally pulled out of the partnership in 2014.
This pullout, combined with NOAO's decision to cease its
participation, left WIYN with a loss of 57% of its financial support.

Since then the remaining partners have been scrambling to find
others to pick up the shortfall, with mixed success. In late 2014 they
obtained one new partner, the University of Missouri, but as Salzer
noted then, "We are not at the point of having filled our dance
card. We are substantially short of that."

Early in 2015, however, NASA stepped forward and proposed that, in
partnership with the NSF, it assume the NOAO portion of WIYN's
partnership. The deal will have NASA build and install on WIYN an
extremely precise radial-velocity spectrometer, designed to observe
candidate exoplanets and confirm their existence while also obtaining
their masses. NOAO will manage this program for the agencies and so will
remain a WIYN partner. Its share of telescope time will still be open to
the community, but with priority given to proposals devoted to this
work.

In early 2015 NASA put out a call for proposals to build this
instrument. In the meantime WIYN remains fully open and funded,
available for exoplanet as well as general research.

The Future

Of the four Kitt Peak observatories faced with a budget crunch,
only one, the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, currently faces shutdown.
There is a strong effort to prevent that shutdown or make it very
temporary.

Despite Kitt Peak's improved situation, my evening with
Trueblood and Lebofsky at the 2.1-meter remains bittersweet. While the
telescope might be saved, it wasn't going to be saved for them.
Under the telescope's new partnership, serious, independent
researchers will only have access to 20 nights per year; the other
nights now belong to those paying for its operation.

And although the larger national observatory instruments in the
works will also be open to all, competition will be stiffer on these
big-aperture scopes, and there will be fewer nights available. The
question of where independent astronomers will go in the future for
telescope time remains unanswered.

When he isn't watching astronomers locate dangerous asteroids,
S&T Contributing Editor Robert Zimmerman is posting regularly on his
website, Behind the Black, on science, technology, politics, and
culture: behindtheblack.com.

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